Hey, White House Correspondents' Dinner critics: Relax, enjoy

Snarky articles on the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner have become obligatory.

Attacking the dinner has become like attacking the Academy Awards (neither Alfred Hitchcock nor Orson Welles ever won for best director!) or the Miss America Pageant (Oklahoma has won six times, but 19 states have never won at all! What is up with that?).

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WHCD 2013: Celebrity politics

The dinner is mocked as the “Nerd Prom” at which a bunch of journalists sausage themselves into their dusty tuxedoes and off-the-rack gowns and pretend they are famous by rubbing elbows with people who really are famous. People like Scarlett Johansson, who reportedly will be seated this year next to Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood. Wouldn’t you die to be a fly on that table?

The dinner is also criticized as yet another example of how the press has violated its sacred role of despising the people it covers.

The New York Times used to purchase tables at the dinner, but now does not. “We are not being holier than thou [by not attending], or criticizing anyone who chooses to go,” then-Times Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet [now managing editor for news operations] told The New York Observer in an email in 2011.

“But we came to the conclusion that it had evolved into a very odd, celebrity-driven event that made it look like the press and government all shuck their adversarial roles for one night of the year, sing together (literally, by the way) and have a grand old time cracking jokes. It just feels like it sends the wrong signal to our readers and viewers, like we are all in it together and it is all a game. It feels uncomfortable.”

Really? To me it feels like a party, a night out at which a couple of thousand people drink heavily before, during and after dinner, and try to look sober whenever the C-SPAN cameras pan their way.

And the singing part? All I ever remember singing at a WHCA dinner is “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Did that “shuck” my “adversarial role” with the politicians in attendance? I sing the same song at the ballpark and I still feel I have the right to boo.

But maybe the point is that the difference between celebrity journalists and celebrity politicians and Hollywood celebrities is too small. We should each occupy our own worlds of mutual contempt and that would be better for America.

And the dinner has taken on a certain weird importance to some.

Take Anthony Weiner. Please.

Disgraced former Rep. Anthony Weiner, who resigned from office after he was caught being a serial sexter, is now considering a return to public office because he has been through enough.

According to a recent issue of The New York Times Magazine, in which he and his wife were interviewed: “‘We have been in a defensive crouch for so long,’ Weiner said. Their lives have become too small, too circumscribed, too claustrophobic for a couple accustomed to public life. They haven’t been to a major event together — no White House Correspondents’ Dinner, no red-carpet events — in nearly two years.”